In this period he worked in collaboration with many leading European directors, including Peter Stein, Joachim Herz, Lucian Pintilie, and Harry Kupfer, conducting a wide repertoire of Verdi, Wagner, Janáček, Strauss, Berg and Britten and, in 1986, performances of the complete Ring Cycle.
He conducted five complete performances of Scottish Opera’s acclaimed production of the Ring Cycle, which opened at the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival and was subsequently seen at the Theatre Royal Glasgow, and The Lowry, Salford.
He led Scottish Opera on a number of visits abroad: to Lisbon in 1994, to the 2000 Vienna Festival, where the Company performed its highly praised production of Macbeth, and to Porto in 2001, where he conducted the European première of MacMillan’s Inês de Castro.
[3] After Cambridge, Richard Armstrong joined the music staff of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where he worked with Georg Solti on the Ring, with Carlo Maria Giulini on La traviata, with Otto Klemperer on Fidelio and with Rafael Kubelík on Jenůfa.
His opera work abroad includes engagements in Frankfurt (where he was, for two seasons, Principal Guest Conductor), Geneva, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, Rome, Lisbon, Brussels, Nice, Canada, Australia, Stuttgart, Berlin, Toulouse and Los Angeles.